It undercuts productivity, spending, and investment, stunting national growth. It contributes to inequality and spurs social tension. Joblessness and inactivity and the failure to tap into the economic aspirations and resources of young people carry an even higher price.

As prospects dwindle, many face social exclusion, or see their emotional, mental, or physical health deteriorate.

...

Young people account for roughly 40 percent of the world’s unemployed and are up to four times more likely to be unemployed than adults.

...

When young people are not fully participating in the labor force or are NEETs, governments forgo tax revenue and incur the cost of social safety nets, unemployment benefits and insurances, and lost roductivity. Businesses risk losing a generation of consumers. Social costs are ever mounting as well. The Arab Spring and subsequent youth-led uprisings in many countries, along with the rise of economic insurgency and youth extremism, demand that we explore the links between economic participation, inequality, and community security, crime, and national fragility through a lens focused on youth. What we see is a generation in economic crisis.

Over the next decade, a billion more young people will enter the job market—and only 40 percent are expected to be able to enter jobs that currently exist. The global economy will need to create 600 million jobs over the next 10 years: that’s 5 million jobs each month simply to keep employment rates constant.

The youngest workers have been hit hardest by the financial crisis and the global recession of the last decade because they often held the temporary jobs, which offer less protection. The youth unemployment rate is projected to be 13.1 percent in 2015, compared with 4.5 percent for adults, according to the ILO.

Global employers are looking not only for technical and academic skills, but also such qualities as being open, responsible or organized, ...Young workers are often either overqualified or underqualified for their jobs, it said.

"In emerging economies that are progressively more service-based, employers find a workforce population that lacks necessary skills," the report said. "Elsewhere, the problem is that many of the unemployed are highly educated but the market demands different competencies or more technical or vocational skills."

At stake is the well-being of the entire global economy. Without an income, millions of young people slump into poverty. By delaying their entry into the workforce or accepting low-paying jobs, many limit their lifetime earning potential. When young people don't work, governments don't get the tax revenue and businesses fail to gain customers.

"Social costs are ever mounting as well," the report said, citing youth-led uprisings in many Arab countries and the rise of economic insurgency and youth extremism. "What we see is a generation in economic crisis."

Having bailed them out and then helped to repair their balance sheets with record-low interest rates and bond-buying, policy makers may assist the financial industry once more when the U.S. Federal Reserve begins tightening monetary policy.

That’s according to two recently published reports by the Bank for International Settlements and McKinsey & Co., both of which have highlighted the downsides of ultra-easy borrowing costs in the past. Based on seven years of data from 109 large international banks in 14 countries, the BIS confirmed a relationship between short-term rates and the slope of the curve for bond yields with bank profitability.

The conclusion drawn by Claudio Borio, the head of the monetary and economic department at the BIS, and colleagues is that the positive impact of being able to earn income by lending money out for higher rates over time is bigger than the hit of defaults and income that doesn’t carry interest.

Even better news for the banks is that the effect is strongest when rates are lower and the yield curve isn’t that steep, as is now the case.

That provides another reason for the BIS’s economists to again decry the unintended side-effects of accommodative monetary policy. They reckon that between 2011 and 2014, the average bank of those studied lost one year of profits as a result of low rates.

“All this suggests that over time, unusually low interest rates and an unusually flat term structure erode bank profitability,” said Borio, Leonardo Gambacorta and Boris Hofmann in the report, which was published on Oct. 1.

Return on equity at 500 global lenders was unchanged in 2014 at 9.5 percent, about the average of the last 35 years, according to the Sept. 30 study by McKinsey. Profit margins also continued a steady decline, dropping by 185 basis points in 2014, in part because of lower rates. It reckons tighter policy would boost return on equity by about 2 percentage points.

“Many in the industry are waiting for an interest rate rise or some other structural lift to profits,” McKinsey said.

There is a sting in the tale. It warned that even if rates do rise, profit margins may still not return to their pre-crisis highs.

“Much of the benefit will get competed away, and risk-costs will likely increase, especially in economies where the recovery is still fragile,” McKinsey said.

Posted:Wed, 14 Oct 2015 01:30:00 GMT

Since inception in June 1998, UBS' Managed High Yield Plus Fund survived through the dot-com (and Telco) collapse and the post-Lehman credit carnage but, based on the press release today, has been felled by the current credit cycle's crash. After 3 years of trading at an increasingly large discount to NAV, and plunging to its worst levels since the peak of the financial crisis, the board of the Fund has approved a proposal to liquidate the Fund. While timing is unclear, this is the worst case for an increasingly fragile cash bond market as BWICs galore are set to hit with "liquidty thin to zero."

Having survived 17 years...

It's Over... (as The Fund Statement reads):

Managed High Yield Plus Fund Inc. (the "Fund") (NYSE:HYF) announced today that the Board of Directors (the “Board”) of the Fund has approved a proposal to liquidate the Fund in 2016, subject to shareholder approval.

After careful deliberation and a thorough review of the available alternatives, and based upon the recommendation of UBS Global Asset Management (Americas) Inc. (“UBS AM”), the Fund’s manager, the Board has determined that liquidation and dissolution of the Fund is in the best interests of the Fund. A proposed plan of liquidation will be submitted for the approval of the Fund’s shareholders at a special shareholders meeting of the Fund, which will be scheduled to be held in April 2016. If the shareholders approve the proposed plan, the liquidation and dissolution of the Fund will take place as soon as reasonably practicable, but in no event later than December 31, 2016 (absent unforeseen circumstances).

Further information regarding the liquidation proposal, including the plan of liquidation, will be included in the proxy materials that will be mailed to the Fund’s shareholders in advance of the shareholders meeting.

...discussing illiquid corporate credit markets is easier if you find yourself among polite company. You see, the lack of liquidity in the secondary market for corporate bonds is a somewhat benign discussion because although it unquestionably stems from a noxious combination of regulatory incompetence and irresponsible monetary policy, myopic corporate management teams and the BTFD crowd, not to mention ETF issuers, have also played an outsized role, so there’s no need to lay the blame entirely on the masters of the universe who occupy the Eccles Building and on the "liquidity providing" HFT crowd that’s found regulatory capture to be just as easy as frontrunning.

But while explanations for the absence of liquidity vary from market to market, the response is becoming increasingly homogenous. Put simply: market participants are simply moving away from cash markets and into derivatives. Where market depth has disappeared, it’s become increasingly difficult to transact in size without having an outsized effect on prices. This means that for big players - fund managers, for instance - selling into ever thinner secondary markets is a dangerous proposition. And not just for the manager, but for market prices in general.

With the stage thus set, Bloomberg has more on the move to smaller trades and cash market substitutes:

Sometimes less is more. At least according to investment managers trying to navigate Europe’s credit markets.

TwentyFour Asset Management capped a bond fund to new investors at 750 million pounds ($1.2 billion) and JPMorgan Asset Management, which is marketing a 128 million-pound fund, said smaller investments are more flexible in a sell-off. Other managers are also limiting the size of their trades and using derivatives to avoid getting trapped in positions.

It’s become more difficult to buy and sell securities as Greece’s financial crisis curbs risk taking and dealers scale back trading activity to meet regulations introduced since the financial crisis. The Bank for International Settlements warned of a "liquidity illusion" in June because bond holdings are becoming concentrated in the hands of fund managers as banks pull back.

"Liquidity is generally poor in corporate bond markets and in the U.K. market it’s thin to zero,"said Mike Parsons, head of U.K. fund sales at JPMorgan Asset Management in London. "You don’t want to be in a gigantic fund where there’s potential for a lot of investors rushing for the exit at the same time. Smaller funds are more nimble."

"Without enough strong liquidity, it’s hard to execute bond trades in sufficient size or price to move portfolio risk around quickly or cheaply," he said. "The bigger the position, the harder it is to find enough liquidity to sell it or buy it."

Liquidity in credit markets has dropped about 90 percent since 2006, according to Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. That’s because dealers are using less of their own money to trade as new regulation makes it less profitable.

Euro-denominated corporate bonds got an average of 5.3 dealer quotes per trade last week, up from 4.5 recorded in January and compared with a peak of 8.8 in 2009, according to Morgan Stanley data. That’s based on dealer prices compiled by Markit Group Ltd. for bonds in its iBoxx indexes.

Liquidity is especially bad in the U.K. corporate bond market, which is being abandoned by companies looking to take advantage of lower borrowing costs in euros and investors seeking securities that are easier to buy and sell.

NN Investment Partners said it seeks to manage difficult trading conditions by diversifying positions and capping trade size. The Netherlands-based asset manager avoids owning large concentrations of a single bond and uses derivatives such as credit-default swaps or futures that are easier to buy and sell, said Hans van Zwol, a portfolio manager.

"We really want to stay away from positions we can’t get out of," he said.

The conundrum here is that the more reluctant market participants are to venture into increasingly illiquid cash markets, the more illiquid those markets become.

Credit-rating firms are downgrading more U.S. companies than at any other time since the financial crisis, and measures of debt relative to cash flow are rising.

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services downgraded U.S. companies 297 times in the first nine months of the year, the most downgrades since 2009, compared with just 172 upgrades.

Deteriorating fundamentals...

U.S. companies have increased borrowing to levels exceeding those just before the financial crisis, as firms pursue big acquisitions and seek to boost stock prices by buying back shares. According to one metric, the ratio of debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for companies that carry investment-grade ratings, meaning triple-B-minus or above, was 2.29 times in the second quarter. That’s higher than the 1.91 times in June 2007, just before the crisis, according to figures from Morgan Stanley.

“We’re seeing more widespread weakness across more industry sectors in the U.S.,” Ms. Vazza said. “It’s become broader than just the commodity story.”

“The metrics that you measure health and credit by have peaked a while ago,” said Sivan Mahadevan, head of credit strategy at Morgan Stanley. “They are beginning to deteriorate.”

* * *

And as we noted earlier, the credit cycle has well and truly rolled over...

And no lesser market veteran than Art Cashin is concerned, What are the signals you are looking for to stay on top in such a market?

I continue to monitor the high yield market and see where that goes. The high yield market has been of some concern of the last several weeks. If that begins to show appreciable weakness than I would think the caution flags stay up.

Posted:Tue, 13 Oct 2015

Despite The Fed's best efforts to crush the business cycle, the crucial credit-cycle has reared its ugly headas releveraging firms (gotta fund those buybacks) and deflationary pressures (liabilities fixed, assets tumble) have led to a surging market cost of capital.

As WSJ reports,softening U.S. corporate fundamentals have been largely overlooked but the markets for riskier debt have become snarled with rising downgrades and an increase in U.S. corporate defaults indicate “some cracks on the surface” of the domestic-growth outlook. In fact, in the latest quarter, theratio of upgrades-to-downgrades is its weakest since the peak of the financial crisis in 2009.

Falling profits and increased borrowing at U.S. companies are rattling debt markets, a sign the six-year-long economic recovery could be under threat.

Credit-rating firms are downgrading more U.S. companies than at any other time since the financial crisis, and measures of debt relative to cash flow are rising.

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services downgraded U.S. companies 297 times in the first nine months of the year, the most downgrades since 2009, compared with just 172 upgrades.

Meanwhile, the trailing 12-month default rate on lower-rated U.S. corporate bonds was 2.5% in September, up from 1.4% in July of last year, according to S&P.

Analysts expect profits at large companies to decline for a second straight quarter for the first time since 2009.

U.S. companies have increased borrowing to levels exceeding those just before the financial crisis, as firms pursue big acquisitions and seek to boost stock prices by buying back shares. According to one metric, the ratio of debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for companies that carry investment-grade ratings, meaning triple-B-minus or above, was 2.29 times in the second quarter. That’s higher than the 1.91 times in June 2007, just before the crisis, according to figures from Morgan Stanley.

“We’re seeing more widespread weakness across more industry sectors in the U.S.,” Ms. Vazza said. “It’s become broader than just the commodity story.”

“The metrics that you measure health and credit by have peaked a while ago,” said Sivan Mahadevan, head of credit strategy at Morgan Stanley. “They are beginning to deteriorate.”

FRA Co-Founder Gordon T. Long interviews Jeff Davis of Mercer Capital, and discusses financial repression and its effects on the banking sector.

Davis is currently a Managing Director of Financial Institutions Group at Mercer Capital. Davis also provides financial advisory services primarily related to the valuation of privately-held equity and debt issued by financial services companies and advisory related to capital structures and M&A.

FINANCIAL REPRESSION’S EFFECT ON THE US BANKING SECTOR

“Financial repression is a price control that relates to all facets of the economy and has profound impact.”

The 3 major cycles: Business Cycle, Credit Cycle and Rate Cycle.

“The banks straddle all 3 to be a key contributor of capital in the US economy. Financial repression impacts at a very base level for all 3 cycles.”

“Financial repression has artificially pumped up asset value.

“Commercial real estate values really pivoted in 2010. There is additional risk in the system now that asset values are pumped up”

Commercial Real Estate Values

Leverage Ratio

“If you look at the leverage ratio we can see that over the last 20 years the industry has been raising capital. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We are significantly much better capitalized than Europe which is a good thing, but as it relates to an investor there is a lower return on equity.”

“Regarding financial repression, if you think about interest rates today, it is very painful for an institution to hold cash. There is significant risk taking occurring amongst commercial banks in taking additional credit risk and duration risk. Structurally banks aren’t as spread in terms of their assets relative to their borrowings that fund these assets.”

“Companies don’t go broke because they don’t make money. Companies go broke when they have no liquidity, so what financial repression has done is push liquidity into the system. So now heavily indebted companies are able to borrow money and we will soon see the consequences of that.”

HOW BANKS FUNCTION

“The banks are special for being separated from commerce.”

“The objective for a bank is to earn a spread on assets. Loans being the highest yielding asset, followed by bonds, and finally cash. The banks role is to take the deposits and prudently while still taking risk, lend the money into the economy to help finance the economy.”

SHADOW BANKING

“Over the last several decades the shadow banking system has developed into an alternative lender as well as another place for people to put their money.”

The term “shadow bank” was coined by economist Paul McCulley in a 2007 speech at the annual financial symposium hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In McCulley’s talk, shadow banking referred mainly to nonbank financial institutions that engaged in what economists call maturity transformation.

Commercial banks engage in maturity transformation when they use deposits, which are normally short term, to fund loans that are longer term. Shadow banks do something similar.

“Shadow banking system is separate from commercial banking system, but is a very large piece of the credit allocator. A lot of risk has been pushed out of commercial banks and is now in the shadow banking system, where it is not as opaque as a commercial bank.”

CONCERNS WITH SUSTAINED LOW INTEREST RATES

One day there will be a reckoning. It’s simply a buildup of risk; an attempt by central authorities to guide the economy.

Malinvestment: A mistaken investment in wrong lines of production, which inevitably lead to wasted capital and economic losses, subsequently requiring the reallocation of resources to more productive uses.

“A delay of lost recognition and mass malinvestment which is all a credit risk within the banking systems. However, my biggest concern is a dramatic slowdown in the economy, short rates at zero.”

Money is being shredded at an unprecedented rate in a souped-up exchange-traded fund tied to Japan’s most famous stock index.

Since mid-August, investors have poured a record $4.5 billion into the Next Funds Nikkei 225 Leveraged Index ETF, a security designed to rise or fall twice as fast as its namesake equity gauge. That’s too bad, considering that twice the Nikkei 225 Stock Average’s loss over that period comes out to about 21 percent.

So fast have the country’s individual investors been plowing money into the fund that even as a fifth was lopped off its price, its market value more than doubled. It’s the largest security of its kind in the world, and is now big enough to affect the whole stock market as overseers rush to buy and sell securities to meet its price target, according to BNP Paribas Investment Partners Ltd.

“They are taking up a larger proportion of the market,” said Tony Glover, head of the investment management department at BNP Paribas Investment Partners Japan in Tokyo. “Volatile markets are not great news with increasingly wider intraday swings. The funds are a big factor causing this.”

The ETF has become more popular with traders than even Toyota Motor Corp., Japan’s biggest company. Average turnover for the ETF was about 250 billion yen ($2.1 billion) a day over the past two months, triple that of Toyota.

"The biggest providers of exchange-traded funds, which have been funneling billions of investor dollars into some little-traded corners of the bond market, are bolstering bank credit lines for cash to tap in the event of a market meltdown. Vanguard Group, Guggenheim Investments and First Trust are among U.S. fund companies that have lined up new bank guarantees or expanded ones they already had, recent company filings show," Reuters reported at the time, in a story we suspect did not get the attention it deserved.

At a base level, these precautionary measures are the result of the interplay between central bank policy and the unintended consequences of the post-crisis regulatory regime. ZIRP creates a hunt a for yield and simultaneously incentivizes companies (especially cash strapped companies) to tap the bond market while borrowing costs remain artificially suppressed. Clearly, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The longer rates on risk free assets remain near, at, or even below zero, the more demand there is for new corporate issuance (the rationale being that at least corporate credit offers some semblance of yield). More demand means rates on corporate credit are driven still lower, and once yields on high grade issues get close to the lower limit, yield-starved investors are then herded into HY.

All of this supply in the primary market comes at a time when liquidity in the secondary market for corporate credit is non-existent thanks to the shrinking dealer books that resulted from the government’s (maybe) well-meaning attempt to crack down on prop trading. The result: a crowded theatre with a tiny exit.

This situation has been exacerbated by the proliferation of bond ETFs which have allowed retail investors to pile into corners of the fixed income world where they might not belong.

... and the rapid growth of bond funds in the post-crisis world (via BIS)...

So given the above, the question is this: if something were to spook the market - a rate hike cycle for instance, or an October revolver raid on HY energy names, or an exogenous geopolitical shock - causing an exodus from these funds, what would happen to prices if fund managers were suddenly forced to transact in size in an illiquid secondary market in order to meet redemptions?

"Nothing good", is the answer.

The solution is to avoid selling the underlying bonds - even when investors are selling their shares in the funds.

But how is this possible?

To a certain extent, outflows in one fund can be offset by inflows to another. These "diversifiable flows" are one happy byproduct of the great ETF proliferation. Here's a refresher on how this works courtesy of Barclays.

* * *

Portfolio Products Replace Dealer Inventory

While diversifiable flows limit the risks to portfolio managers in principle, the reality of the high yield market is more complicated. Managers have specific views on tenor, callability, sectors, covenants, and, most importantly, individual credits, such that actually finding buyers for specific bonds can be quite difficult. In the pre-crisis period, dealers ran large inventories that effectively facilitated the netting of flows across funds (Figure 1). A fund with an outflow would sell bonds into the dealer community, and funds with outflows would buy bonds out of the dealer inventory. When inventory is large, the fact that the specific bonds bought and sold did not match was largely irrelevant. Funds with outflows could sell the bonds of their choice, and the funds with inflows could pick investments from the large variety of inventory held by dealers.

The matching problem has become more acute as dealer inventories have declined. Even funds can net flows in principle, dealers are much less willing to warehouse bonds, and are much more likely to buy only when they believe they can quickly offload the risk. Under this scenario, the fact that flows can theoretically be netted is of little practical use to fund managers – actually netting individual bonds is extremely difficult, particularly in the short time frame required by funds offering daily liquidity to end investors.

This is where portfolio products come in. Investors can use portfolio products to fund outflows/invest inflows immediately and execute the necessary single-name bond trades over time as liquidity in the underlying bond market allows (Figure 2). In this scenario, funds with inflows and outflows simply exchange portfolio products, sidestepping the immediate need to trade single-name corporate bonds.

* * *

Ok great, so ETFs provide a kind of "phantom" liquidity if you will. There are two problems with this:

It only works when flows are diversifiable. Once flows become unidirectional, it all goes out the window.

In other words, if I'm a fund manager, the idea that ETFs provide liquidity rests on the assumption that when I experience outflows, someone else will be experiencing inflows and thus I can sell ETFs and avoid offloading my bonds into an illiquid corporate credit market. Put another way: I am depending on new money coming into the market to fund redemptions from previous investors who are exiting the market, all so that I can avoid liquidating assets that are declining in value and that I believe will be difficult to sell. There's a term for that kind of business. It's called a ponzi scheme and just like all other ponzi schemes, when the new money dries up (so, for example, when HY bond ETF flows are all headed in the wrong direction), the only way to meet redemptions is to get what I can for the assets I have and when the market for those assets is thin (as the secondary market for corporate credit most certainly is), I may incur substantial losses.

Note also that the more often ETFs are used as a way of avoiding the underlying bond market, the more illiquid that market becomes, making the situation still more precarious in the event of a panic.

So what is a fund manager to do?

This is where we come full circle to the emergency liquidity lines mentioned at the outset. In order to avoid tapping the underlying illiquid bond market in a situation where flows are unidirectional, fund managers may instead pay out redemptions in borrowed cash.

This is, to quote Citi's Matt King, "creative destruction destroyed."

Only worse.

That is, this represents the willful delay of a long overdue episode of creative destruction layered atop another delay of the much needed Schumpeterian endgame. Stripping out the metaphysics and philosophy references, that can be translated as follows: this strategy is yet another example of delaying the inevitable. If fund managers are forced to tap these liquidity lines it likely means investors have found a reason to sell en masse and if that reason turns out to be something that permanently impairs the value of the underlying bonds (as opposed to a transitory, irrational panic) then all the funds are doing by borrowing to meet redemptions is employing leverage to stave off the recognition of losses, which is ironically the same thing (in principle anyway) that the companies whose bonds they’re holding have done to stay in business. It’s a delay-and-pray scheme designed to avoid selling the debt of companies whose similar delay-and-pray schemes have run their course.

In closing, it's important to note that no fund manager in the world will be able to line up enough emergency liquidity protection to avoid tapping the corporate credit market in the event of panic selling in the increasingly crowded market for bond funds.

In other words, when the exodus comes, the illiquidity that's been chasing markets for the better part of seven years will finally catch up, and at that point, all bets are officially off.

* * *

At the end of the day, one is reminded of what Howard Marks' recently said about ETFs:

"[They] can't be more liquid than the underlying and we know the underlying can be quite illiquid."

We are about to get the real-life answer to Howard Marks' more critical question: "What happens when ETF Holders all sell at once?"

Here we go again. The dying legacy media will continue to support the status quo, who provide their dwindling advertising revenue, by papering over the truth with platitudes, lies, and misinformation. I have been detailing the long slow death of retail in America for the last few years. The data and facts are unequivocal. Therefore, the establishment and their media mouthpieces need to suppress the truth.

They spin every terrible report in the most positive way possible. They blame lousy retail results on the weather. They blame them on calendar effects. They blame them on gasoline sales plunging. That one is funny, because we heard for months that retail spending would surge because people had more money in their pockets from the huge decline in gasoline prices.

September retail sales were grudgingly reported by the Census Bureau this morning and they were absolutely dreadful. This followed an atrocious August report. The MSM couldn’t blame it on snow, cold, flooding, drought, or even swarms of locusts. So they just buried the story in their small print headlines. The propaganda media machine had nothing. They continue to spew the drivel about a 5.1% unemployment rate as a reflection of a booming jobs market. If we really have a booming jobs market, we would have a booming retail sector. The stagnant retail market reveals the jobs data to be fraudulent. The 94 million people supposedly not in the job market can’t buy shit with their good looks.

Despite the storyline about consumer austerity being the reason for sluggish spending, the facts prove otherwise. Consumer spending accounted for 68% of GDP in 2008 at the peak. Seven years later it still represents 68% of GDP. The difference is the spending has shifted dramatically towards services since the Wall Street created financial crisis. Spending on services has grown by 31% versus 20% for goods since 2008. Guess what has caused that surge?

OBAMACARE

Spending on healthcare has skyrocketed for the average person. Rent, taxes, utilities and educational expenses have all exploded higher. Meanwhile, real median household incomes are 7% lower than they were in 2008. They are 7% lower than they were in 2000 and equal to the level of 1989. And the bubble headed bimbos on CNBC can’t understand why retail sales aren’t booming? Did they get their journalism degrees from the University of Phoenix or Trump University?

Let’s dig into the data for some shits and giggles. First off, you need to realize how bad it really is when you consider US automakers are essentially giving away vehicles to anyone who can fog a mirror, as long as they are willing to obligate themselves into never ending debt enslavement. The average amount financed of $27,000 and the average length of loan of 65 months are both record highs. As the automakers get more desperate by the day, 7 year 0% loans are now becoming the norm. Dealer incentives in the thousands proliferate. And subprime auto loans now constitute over 20% of all sales. The pace of subprime auto loans has more than doubled the pace of prime loans since 2010.

The Fed, Treasury and Wall Street decided auto sales would be the tonic to cure our economic ills, so they opened up the debt floodgate to get everyone and anyone into a new vehicle. They needed booming auto sales to provide the appearance of economic recovery. So, while overall consumer expenditures increased by 21% since 2010, auto loan debt grew by an astounding 41%. An this is just the debt side of the equation.

Over 27% of all vehicle “sales” are actually leases. Calling a three year rental a car sale stretches the concept of sale to the limits. Anyone who finances a car over seven years or leases a car, can never escape the chains of monthly payment debt. They will always be underwater, just the way Wall Street likes it. The proof these “strong” auto sales are just another debt based scheme are the non-existent profits of automakers and stock prices at 2010 levels. If auto sales are so healthy why would GM stock be down 18% since 2013 and Ford stock down 14% in the last year?

If you strip out the debt financed auto bonanza, retail sales are pitiful on a monthly and annual basis. I thought the later Labor Day was the reason for poor August sales. Maybe kids didn’t go back to school this year. The categories with NEGATIVE monthly sales was immense: Electronics & appliances (what about that housing boom), Building materials & garden equipment, Food & beverage, Gasoline stations, General Merchandise (Wal-Mart), Misc stores, Nonstore (Amazon). Overall, retail sales excluding autos was down 0.3% over the prior month. August sales were down 0.1% over July. The news just gets worse and worse as the government reports lower and lower unemployment. A fascinating dichotomy.

The annual and year to date figures are even more disturbing. The annualized and year to date numbers show 0.8% to 1.2% increases. If you believe your government that there is no inflation (Social Security recipients will get a 0% increase in their benefits next year – should do wonders for retail sales), then those pitiful increases are valid. If you live in the real world where your costs to live are going up by 5% or more, real retail sales are negative. The way to figure out who is lying is to look at the profits of retailers. They are plunging, so shockingly the government is lying about inflation.

Retail sales have missed the expectations of highly paid Wall Street economists 7 out of the last 10 months and 10 out of the last 15 months. But they guarantee sales will be strong next month. Maybe they should double seasonally adjust retail sales like they did GDP because it gets cold in the winter. How could the retail sales be so pitiful when the unemployment rate has fallen from 8.9% to 5.1% over the same time frame? Maybe someone could ask Obama at his next press conference.

The fact of the matter is that year over year retail sales at these levels only happen during recessions. It’s really that simple. Without the crutch of subprime auto loans and student loan debt being spent by pretend University of Phoenix students on iGadgets, fitbits, hookers and blow, this economy would already be in free fall.

Look no further than what happened to Wal-Mart today for confirmation we are in the midst of a worldwide recession, if not depression. Their stock fell by 10%, the largest one day loss in their history as a public company. Their stock is down 30% this year.

Make no mistake about it, Wal-Mart is a global retailer whose annual sales dwarf the GDP of most of the countries on the planet. They announced flat revenue for the current year and slashed next year’s earnings expectations by 12%. As usual, they blame external factors for their failures. The strong dollar seems to be the excuse de jour among the multi-national corporations who rule the globe. If they didn’t want to deal with currency risk, they shouldn’t have gone global. It’s a cost of doing business, not an excuse.

I found it amusing that Marketwatch had their headline as Wal-Mart to Buyback $20 Billion of Stock, rather than reporting that Wal-Mart’s profits are crashing by billions. The propaganda machine just doing their job. Every clueless highly educated CEO of floundering corporate behemoths follows the exact same game plan. Borrow money as your profits are in decline to buyback your stock near record highs to give the appearance that EPS is growing. If you can’t make profits, fake them. At least the executives will get their million dollar bonuses while announcing more layoffs. That always delights Wall Street.

All economic indicators are flashing red and warning of recession. Retail sales, that account for two thirds of economic activity, are falling. Corporate profits are plunging. Middle class Americans haven’t seen their household income rise since 1989. The last two employment reports were horrific. The number of job layoff announcements by corporations is up 36% year to date and has already exceeded the total for 2014.

The only people who refuse to acknowledge recession reality are the Wall Street hucksters, looking to fleece a few more muppets before their party is over. They’ve created a short covering rally, despite the awful economic news, ridiculously high valuations, record levels of margin debt, and a public who left the markets years ago. Rigging the markets, utilizing free money from the Fed, producing fake profits through government sanctioned accounting fraud and using high frequency trading machines to manipulate the market can only get you so far.

Propaganda and lies can’t stop this recession. The Fed never took their foot off the gas, so we are headed for the cliff at 100 miles per hour. I wonder what happens next.

Tipping Points Life Cycle - ExplainedClick on image to enlarge

Gordon T Long is not a registered advisor and does not give investment advice. His comments are an expression of opinion only and should not be construed in any manner whatsoever as recommendations to buy or sell a stock, option, future, bond, commodity or any other financial instrument at any time. Of course, he recommends that you consult with a qualified investment advisor, one licensed by appropriate regulatory agencies in your legal jurisdiction, before making any investment decisions, and barring that, we encourage you confirm the facts on your own before making important investment commitments.

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Gordon emperically recommends that you consult with a qualified investment advisor, one licensed by appropriate regulatory agencies in your legal jurisdiction, before making any investment decisions, and barring that, he encourages you confirm the facts on your own before making important investment commitments.

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